Failing to Know Martin Luther King, Jr.

A saying favored by the French fits Martin Luther King, Jr.'s chronic plagiarism in graduate school: It was worse than a crime; it was a mistake. It was a mistake in the sense that it was a repeated act of self-betrayal and subversion of the rules of scholarship that was unnecessary from the point of view of ability or circumstances. As the first scholarly biographer of the primary American civil rights leader of the century (devoting the chapter "The Philosopher King" to King's graduate school years), I had learned very little about King that I did not already suspect or that, in the absence of suspicions, I found genuinely astonishing until nearly a year ago. With the revelations detailed above by the Martin Luther King, Jr., Papers Project, that is, regrettably, no longer the case. I was as appalled to learn of Dr. King's plagiarism as project director Clayborne Carson and his associates must have been pained to make them public in a forthright, thorough divulgence. Twenty-one years ago I cinched my seat belt for the rough ride ahead over the sexual potholes in Dr. King's career -although chasm might be the more apt characterization after the publication of the Reverend Ralph David Abernathy's unfortunate recent memoir. There have been jolts aplenty but never disorientation on the biographical trail, from John A. Williams via David Garrow and Taylor Branch to Ralph Abernathy, of seamy capers in motels and Oval Office auditions of lubricious Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) tapes. Admittedly, my own views on the constitutional inviolability of private sexual conduct gave me a rather high shock threshold, but it was far more relevant that, from virtually the first days of research, I was made abundantly aware, both by partisans and denigrators, of the large factor of sex in the life and times of Martin Luther King, Jr.1 An early research experience, illustrative of the uses and abuses equally of sex and race in American life, contributed enormously to my sangfroid in doing biography. In a late sixties press interview, a conservative United States senator, a leading Republican, digressed off the record with one of my sources to deplore Dr. King's